[In the following review, Atack assesses the strengths of Simone de Beauvoir.]

Although the corpus devoted to her work is not large compared to that of Sartre or Camus, Simone de Beauvoir has recently been gaining the critical attention she deserves as writer and philosopher. Toril Moi's book [Simone de Beauvoir] is particularly orientated towards the latter dimension, but the interdisciplinary framework she is mobilizing also encompasses the autobiography, some of the fiction, and the life. Her aim is to analyse how Beauvoir came to be ‘the emblematic intellectual woman of the twentieth century’ (p. 1). Moi argues that she was able to produce Le Deuxième Sexe as a result of being placed at the centre of a unique configuration of discourses and situations and that the crucial moment was her realization that she was an intellectual woman. Moi traces the forging of this identity through Beauvoir's personal and sociological history, paying particular attention to the career trajectory of agrégation, teacher, and writer, and the relationships with Sartre and her parents. Like Michele Le Doeuff in her pathbreaking L'Etude et le rouet (1989), Moi is concerned both to take Beauvoir seriously as an important thinker and to theorize her limitations, and is fascinated by what she calls the ‘epistemological primal scene’ in the Luxembourg Gardens, when Beauvoir recognizes Sartre's superiority as a philosopher. For Moi, this pattern of female subordination to the male is revealed across the biographical and philosophical discourses in a series of unconscious blind spots. The figure of the rational if passionate individual that Beauvoir elaborates in her autobiography tends to crumble under the pressures of sociology (Bourdieu's concepts of habitus, intellectual field, and cultural capital being the key ones here), psychoanalysis, and rhetorical analysis. While Moi notes, in order to deplore it, the frequency with which Beauvoir is often subject to a kind of covert dismissal, being praised in general terms yet attacked for specific ideas and perspectives, and points to the way Beauvoir is effectively presented as a ‘false intellectual’ by being shown to be unconscious of the effects of her own discourse, she herself suggests Beauvoir is ‘deeply unaware of the effects of her own rhetoric’; her philosophical blind spot in relation to her idealization of the male finds its counterparts in the myth of her unity with Sartre being the ‘blind spot of her memoirs’, and the blind spot of the repression of her own marginality as a woman. Moi's originality is to argue that Beauvoir's strengths are in fact born of these contradictions; Le Deuxième Sexe is the product of her uneasy position as both central and marginal, allowing her to analyse marginality from a position of centrality, and to break with philosophy in favour of sociology. None the less, this poses a conundrum for feminist philosophy. If it is argued that in Le Deuxième Sexe Beauvoir idealizes the male, following Sartre in mapping transcendence and immanence onto masculine and feminine sexualities, then Le Deuxième Sexe may have immense historical value, but it is difficult to see what philosophical value it may have for feminism.

While the argumentation and scope of analysis are impressive, reservations about various kinds of contextualization should be mentioned. One understands the materialist basis of the analysis which wishes to give full weight to the effects of gender on intellectual identity, and Moi is writing against the existence of an extensive literature on intellectuals that has notoriously ignored women. But the definition of an intellectual woman as ‘any woman who has ever taken herself seriously as a thinker, particularly in an educational context’ is not its strongest point. This voluntarist definition fails to situate Beauvoir in relation to the debate on the nature of the intellectual, Republicanism, universalism, and sites of intellectual power, and effectively leaves the equation of intellectual, masculine, and universal undisturbed. To consider Beauvoir as intellectual, rather than as intellectual woman, would force these issues on to the agenda, and perhaps that is the next stage. Symptomatic of this is the little account given to Les Temps modernes, despite the documented importance of its political and philosophical project of synthetic anthropology to an understanding of Le Deuxième Sexe. Rather traditionally, in view of the role of journals in the configuration of the intellectual in post-war France, Beauvoir is seen primarily in relation to her books, while she was very intensively involved with other sites of intellectual power. Furthermore, these contexts would emphasize Lacan's immense debt to Sartre and undermine some of the oppositions between existentialist and Lacanian theories of consciousness operating here. From a different cultural generation, the apparent non-recognition of the Hari-kiri tag (‘journal bête et méchant’) in the comment ‘Simone de Beauvoir est bête … et méchante’ is another case in point.

In addition to Le Deuxième Sexe, which is at the heart of the book, there are fine pages on L'Invitée and the ‘Writing of Depression’. This complex and thought-provoking study is an important contribution to Beauvoir studies.